


On Top of the World

by Setcheti



Category: Bourne Legacy (2012), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Betrayal, Depression, Drug Addiction, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Multiverse, Partner Abuse, Past Sexual Assault, Suicide Attempt, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:36:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every person has a breaking point...but not everyone realizes it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Top of the World

**Author's Note:**

> I have not seen Iron Man 3. I have, however, been told about it by other people who saw it, and I have seen the trailers, which ticked me off (*Iron Patriot* suit? WTF, Tony?!?). So yes, my ideas about a few things that went on probably don't match the movie. Those ideas got me to thinking about something, though: Exactly how much do these people think a time-displaced twenty-something soldier is supposed to be able to take? The answer was ‘probably way too much,’ and so this fic happened. Some of it is sad and possibly disturbing, but it is not, repeat NOT a deathfic. 
> 
> WARNINGS (in case you skipped them at the top): Contains mentions of attempted/contemplated suicide, drug use, betrayal, partner abuse, attempted murder, torture, sorcery/magic, Reed Richards’ portal generator, several people being total dicks, some inexcusably deus ex machina plot twists, and a special cameo by Hugo Weaving.

Ever since Tony Stark had given up being Iron Man – thereby getting the woman he loved to give up using Extremis, which he considered a more than fair trade – things had been pretty calm at Stark Tower. He attended board meetings and shareholder meetings, he improved things Stark Industries sold, he invented new things which Stark Industries might want to sell in the future. He slid back into the mindset of being Tony the billionaire genius philanthropist with relative ease, just ditching the playboy part. Pepper was happy, his shareholders were happy, and he was happy.

Or so he kept telling himself, anyway. Which was why the day Bruce Banner and Clint Barton came bursting in on him, absolutely radiating agitation, he quickly stamped out the little flicker of excitement that flared up in his chest. He wasn’t a superhero anymore, and he’d already saved the planet once, which Pepper said should be enough for anyone. Still, though… “Is something attacking the city again?”

Bruce rolled his eyes. “If it was, we wouldn’t be here, now would we?” he observed. “We  need to borrow a plane.”

“You’ll get it back,” Clint added before Tony could say anything. “But you’re the only person we know who we wouldn’t have to steal the damned thing from – although if it’s gonna be an insurance problem for you, we can say we stole it to help you out.”

Tony stood up, stamping out the little flicker again but letting the little knot that was starting to form in his stomach alone. “Who’s in trouble?”

“Nobody, as long as we can get a plane and take off within the hour,” Bruce told him. “So, borrow or steal?”

“Borrow, as long as you tell me who’s in trouble.” The two other men looked at each other. “Oh come on, I know it’s somebody – this is a rescue mission, right? Something Fury said no to? Who is it, Romanov?”

Another look. “He’s not gonna understand, Bruce,” Clint said, shaking his head. “And every minute we stand here tryin’ to explain it to him…”

“Every minute you stand here _not_ explaining it to me,” Tony contradicted. “Bruce, spill. Or I’ll call Fury and ask him.”

Bruce snorted. “Pick a threat you’ll actually follow through on. But you’re right – and so are you, Clint, but we’ll just have to deal with it.” He sighed. “We have to get to Steve. He’s headed North.” He saw Tony not get it, and then saw his eyes widen with shock and horror when he did. “Yeah. He just took off, but I knew where he was going – not like I haven’t been there myself a time or five, you know? He’s heading back to the ice, and I know I can get him back but we still have to go _right now_. Before Fury figures it out and sends someone after him, because that…well, considering the current circumstances, it wouldn’t end well.”

Tony just stared at him for a moment, mouthing the words ‘current circumstances’, and then he shook it off. “Jarvis, we need a plane ready at my private airfield, and cleared for takeoff within the hour. I already have a pilot.”

“I will take care of it, sir,” the disembodied voice of the AI replied placidly. “Shall I cancel your meetings today and inform Ms. Potts?”

“No.” Bruce interrupted, frowning. “He’s not going with us, Jarvis, except to the airstrip to go pick up the plane.”

“Understood, Dr. Banner. Mr. Stark?”

“Have them get the plane ready, don’t notify anyone of anything yet,” Tony confirmed. He scowled back at Bruce, folding his arms across his chest. “I can go with you…”

“No, you can’t. You made a deal.” Clint shook his head. “You think she didn’t make sure all of us knew, Stark? You think we didn’t _all_ get told not to come around here with any superhero stuff?”

“We all got the message,” Bruce confirmed. “You made a deal: She gave it up, you gave it up. You’d done enough, and she’d ruin anyone who asked you to do more. Oh, by the way, if you hadn’t already noticed it? Pepper has some post-addiction issues.”

“Fuck.”

“Which is also something you won’t be gettin’ for a while if you go with us,” Clint told him bluntly. “We’ll get him, Stark, we’ll bring him back, and we’ll find a place to hide him until he’s okay again. We’ll keep you posted.”

“You can bring him back here…”

“He’s not allowed in the building, Pepper’s orders,” Bruce said. “Post-addiction issues, Tony. She can’t have it, so she doesn’t want to see anyone else with it either. I’m only still allowed here because you and I do science stuff together, and because you’d have noticed something was wrong if I suddenly took off when I had literally nowhere else to go.”

Tony swallowed. “Jarvis…”

“Yes sir, Ms. Potts did give those orders,” the AI confirmed. “She is calling, shall I put her through?”

The billionaire’s jaw clenched. “Yes, do that.” The nearest screen flickered on, and Pepper was on it, scowling. “Tony, you have a very important meeting two hours from now. And Agent Barton, Dr. Banner…I thought I’d made myself clear before, but it appears we need to have another little talk.”

“No, they don’t,” Tony all but spat at her, and her blue eyes widened. “My friends can come visit me whenever they want, Pepper,” he said firmly. “They know I gave it up for you, and they respect that.”

She sneered. “Then why did Jarvis just arrange for a plane?”

“Because we asked if we could borrow one,” Clint snapped back at her. “And we already told him he couldn’t go.”

“You and I will _definitely_ be talking later.”

He smiled, looking every inch like the dangerous agent he was. “If you get in the way of me rescuin’ a friend? Then yes, we most definitely will.”

She appeared to blow that off. “Where is Natasha?”

“With Bucky.” Tony gasped when Pepper did, and Bruce nodded slowly. “Neither one of them knows we’re here, we didn’t tell them what was going on. Not that it would have done any good if we had.”

“They’re together,” Clint clarified. “In every sense of the word.” He was still glaring at Pepper. “He’s in seclusion bein’ deprogrammed, she’s with him. It’s not like they could go with us even if they knew.”

“Shit.” Tony had hoped – expected, really – that Natasha Romanov would probably be meeting them at the airstrip. And if Bucky – Bucky! – was back, however that had happened, and Rogers wasn’t with him and was ‘heading North’…oh, this was bad, this was really, really bad. He made a decision. “Jarvis!” he barked. “Cancel my meetings for the next three days, tell them I had a family emergency and I’ll reschedule when I get back.”

Pepper turned red. “Tony, you _promised_ …”

“I promised you I’d stop being Iron Man,” he snapped at her. “I promised I’d leave superhero stuff to the others. I did not say anything about not helping my friends if they needed it, and I did not say you could threaten my friends so they wouldn’t come to visit me.”

She sniffed. “I had a good reason! They showed up and now you’re breaking your promise and running off to god-knows where to…to…break your promise!”

Tony started to say something…and then he stopped. And squinted, looking at her, and when she suddenly stopped being angry and started looking worried, he stiffened all over. “So that’s it,” he said softly. “You knew they’d see it, didn’t you? You knew they’d see it and tell me, so you threatened them to keep them all away. So I wouldn’t find out you were still using it.” 

“No, Tony, you don’t understand! I…”

He looked right into her eyes, and she stopped. “Pepper Potts, I love you. And I’m not breaking my promise, I’m going to go help a friend who’s in a really bad spot right now. I’m going because he saved my life and now it’s time to return the favor, even though he would never in a million years have asked me to. And I’m going because if you hadn’t interfered, if you hadn’t warned everyone off to hide your little problem, they all would have been coming around to visit and we might have been able to intervene before a good man decided the only option he had left was to kill himself.” She choked, and he swallowed hard, shaking his head. “You and I will talk when I get back, and we’ll straighten this out. Because I love you, and I may be angry right now but I’m not going to give up on what we have just because of that – after all, you never gave up on me.”

He made a gesture, and before she could say anything else the connection was cut and the screen went blank. “Jarvis,” he said, sounding tired. “Implement protocol alpha-two-twelve immediately, and lock down my lab and my office while I’m gone.” He turned to the other two men and gave them a grim nod. “I’m sorry you had to hear that, and I’m sorry I didn’t know and put a stop to it before…this happened. Now let’s go save Rogers, you can give me the rest of the details once we’re underway.”

They didn’t talk about it on the way to the airstrip, mainly because Tony spent the entire drive on the phone with various people, talking about business and Pepper and a host of things he wanted those people to take care of regarding both, with one additional call to verify that everything they might need – mainly blankets and cold-weather gear – would be on the plane by the time they got to it. Once they were on the plane, however, he tossed himself into a chair and raised an eyebrow at Bruce, who had pulled out a notebook and was writing in it. “Funny time to be working on your memoirs.”

Bruce just barely glanced up at him. “I’m making you a list. Clint will have to fly the plane, I’ll be asleep, so you’ll be the one who has to look after Steve until I wake up. You don’t need to treat him like a regular hypothermia victim,” he said before Tony could open his mouth. “In fact, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be dangerous for him if you did that. SHIELD was just waiting for him to thaw out enough so they could start an autopsy when he started breathing again, their records say they didn’t do anything at all for him before that because they thought he was dead.”

Tony frowned. “So you’re writing out instructions for me…to just sit and watch him thaw out?”

“No, I’m making you a list of things I want you to do to sort of help him along,” Bruce corrected. “And of things I want you to watch for, good and bad.”

Tony accepted that. “You don’t think we can get to him before he…” He choked on the word, ran a hand through his hair. “God dammit. You think he’ll jump in before we can get there?”

Bruce put down his pencil, closing the notebook. “Honestly, I think he’ll jump in even if he sees us coming – I think he’d fight us to jump in, if it came to that. He just wants it to be over, Tony – he wants the pain to stop. The pain of being alone, of not being needed or wanted.” He saw the dawning scowl. “No, Steve is not feeling sorry for himself, this is…this is something else, something other people have been doing to him. And this is why Clint didn’t think you’d understand.”

“Because you’re the kind of guy who tries not to give his problems the time of day,” Clint called back into the cabin. “You either ignore them or innovate them out of existence. But this isn’t your kind of problem, and you aren’t Steve.”

Tony huffed out a frustrated breath. “Yes, I realize that. And I get it, even I know that my first reaction to other people having problems is to tell them to deal with it; I do not have a whole lot of patience with anybody’s weaknesses, not even my own.  But I also get that there’s something else going on here. You two are making it sound like someone _drove_ him to this point.”

“They did.” That came out in stereo, but Bruce raised a warning hand and shook his head. “No, I can’t – I can’t even let myself _think_ about what’s been going on right now. Clint can explain it to you later, him getting mad won’t destroy the plane.”

Tony blanched. “That bad?”

“Worse.” Bruce took a deep breath, held it, and then blew it back out, and the green tinge faded from his eyes. “For now, let’s focus on getting Steve back and figuring out how to protect him once we’ve got him.”

“Yeah, because he’s smart, so if he ever gets the opportunity to try it again, it’s a good bet we won’t be able to find him.” Clint snorted. “He doesn’t think anyone’s lookin’ for him right now, so he went for speed instead of stealth. He won’t make that mistake a second time.”

Tony held in the stream of curses that wanted to come out, because there were times when even he was wary of setting Bruce off and this was definitely one of them. “We can keep him at the Tower for a while,” he said. “I have safe rooms, nobody would be able to get to him and Jarvis will track his every move so he won’t be able to sneak off. So what about fixing what’s gone wrong inside his head?”

“He’ll need reassurance.” That, surprisingly, came from Clint. “He’s gonna need people around who want him, who care about him. He needs his friends, and that’s us.”

“And then we’ll have to work on rebuilding his sense of self-worth,” Bruce said. “I’m sure it’s pretty much non-existent right now. People like Steve need to feel like they’re useful, like they have something worthwhile to contribute.”

Tony snorted. “He can help detox Pepper.”

“Before, I would have said I thought that was a great idea, but now…” Bruce shook his head. “He’s too vulnerable and she hates him, she’d tear him apart.”

“She doesn’t hate him…”

“She does – she hates him for having what she can’t, even the part that’s just being a guy who can connect you to some untainted memories of the man your father used to be.”

That made Tony’s mouth drop open. “He’s never said anything about…”

“No, because he was warned not to and you didn’t ask.” Bruce shrugged. “If you ask him, he likes to talk about Howard and Peggy and the Howling Commandos. You know that Peggy fired a gun at Steve and Howard once because she caught Steve kissing another girl? Or that Howard and Steve designed Captain America’s field uniform together?” Tony shook his head. “You’re missing out, actually. Steve can be one hell of a storyteller when he wants to be, and he likes to talk about his friends – he says it makes him miss them less if he shares them with other people.”

Tony flinched. “I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“I think everyone forgets that, for him, he’s only been away from them all for about eight months or so,” came from Clint. “I don’t think he was ever really dealing with it, I think he’s just been numb.”

“Yeah, you can’t stay numb forever – I know, I’ve tried.” Tony made a face. “Repeatedly.” 

The conversation pretty much died out after that. 

 

It was several hours’ flight to northern Alaska, then a two-hour stop there while Clint went off to find out where Steve had gone. He came back with a direction and both good and bad news. “He’s supposedly heading for an outpost up there, which we know is a lie, but he paid for a snowmobile and we can track that to follow him. He’s not stupid, he’ll have turned the thing loose with somethin’ wedged on the gas pedal so it won’t mark the spot he went in, but it’s only been half a day – he got here this morning – so I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to tell where he stopped.” He went straight to the cockpit area and started warming up. “I already filed the flight plan. We have to be back by dark, though.”

“The inspectors already warned us,” Tony told him. The inspectors had come on board an hour before, checking for contraband or drugs, and had repeatedly warned Tony and Bruce that if they hadn’t found their friend by nightfall and come back, they’d probably end up joining him in the afterlife. “We’re cleared to go, though.”

“We’ll get him back,” Bruce said. “I can get him back, I know I can.”

And Tony nodded, deciding not to mention that Bruce had, basically, just referred to himself and the Hulk as the same person. Even though he thought that was probably a really good thing, considering.

 

It took them less than an hour to get to the area that Steve on his snowmobile had probably taken a few hours to reach. They ended up finding the snowmobile and then backtracking it, but that didn’t take them long either and then Clint was setting down the plane on a spot as close to the still black hole in the ice as he could safely get.

Bruce stripped off everything except his underwear, shrugging when Tony raised an eyebrow. “So sue me, I’m not one for letting them flap in the breeze – especially not when the breeze is this cold. And I brought more.” He moved to stand in front of the door, taking a few deep breaths like a swimmer getting ready to dive. “If I’m not back up in an hour, go home,” he said, not looking at either of his friends. “Because that’ll mean the ice did it for both of us, and…well, I won’t complain if it does. At the very least, they’ll find us both in the future and we’ll have each other.”

Clint nodded once. “You’ll be savin’ him either way,” was all he said. “One hour.”

“Thanks.” One more deep breath. “Okay, open the door.”

Tony hit the button, and the door slid open, letting a blast of impossibly frigid air into the cabin. Bruce jumped out as soon as there was room for him to do it, and changed in midair before he hit the ground. The Hulk roared at the ice and snow, then stalked over to the hole and jumped in feet-first, disappearing under the placid black water. Tony shut the door again and looked at Clint. “You knew?”

The archer nodded. “I knew he had it in his mind, yeah, but I also knew that wasn’t why we were comin’ up here. He’ll save Steve if he can, and if not our descendants will find them in the future and it’ll start all over again.”

Tony wrapped his arms around himself, not entirely because of the cold. “That…I just don’t know what to say to that, I really don’t.”

Clint shrugged. “You either say welcome back in thirty minutes or goodbye and good luck in an hour.” He cocked his head at Tony. “Now that he’s gone, though…you knew Barnes was kind of an ass, right?”

Tony shrugged. “I suspected. Dad’s journals said Bucky was jealous of Steve, he thought it was eating the guy up. He also said Steve was always trying to fix it and not really getting anywhere.”

“He was right, and it was, and he wasn’t.” Clint sighed and went back to the pilot’s seat; Tony slid into the copilot’s seat across from him. “The Russians used that to break Barnes, they told him Steve abandoned him after he fell, that the Army didn’t look for him…eventually he bought it.”

Tony made a face. “He’s still buying it, isn’t he?”

“Yup.” Clint fiddled with something, tapped a gauge. “He and Nat were together, way back when. As soon as Steve realized that, he told her that if she loved the guy she should be with him. He said there wasn’t anyone better than her to show Barnes how to move on from what he had been so he could make a new life for himself. He even said he understood why the guy didn’t want to see him – they’d been tellin’ Steve he didn’t, anyway – and that it was okay.” He snorted. “Someone should’ve filmed it, he’d be in the running for an Oscar. Although I’m pretty sure the reaction Barnes had if Fury actually did what Bruce told him to would have at least become a really overused Internet meme.” He quirked a half smile at Tony’s puzzled look. “Bruce got up in Fury’s face about it, because they’d been ridin’ Steve about why Barnes was still alive – they didn’t want to ‘upset’ Barnes by asking him, because he was ‘fragile’. Bruce told Fury that if he wanted straight answers he should just march into the seclusion room and tell Barnes that sodomy wasn’t illegal anymore and neither was a blow job, so why didn’t he just cop to which one it had been so they could close the goddamned file already.”

Tony’s mouth dropped open. “He…they…” Clint shrugged, Tony took it in…and then he snorted, shaking his head. “Stress relief in the field?”

“Probably, yeah. Steve won’t say – I’m not sure anyone ever told _him_ it wasn’t still illegal, and since they’ve been coddlin’ Barnes so much he probably thought they’d blame it all on him and say he’d raped the guy.”

Tony shifted, trying to get more comfortable even though most of his discomfort was coming from the inside, not the outside. “Why are they coddling Barnes, anyway? Wasn’t he a bad guy? Usually SHIELD treats bad guys like shit. Hell, usually they even treat good guys like shit, look what they did to Steve when he first woke up. ”

“Yeah, but this bad guy’s been an assassin for decades,” Clint told him. “He’s smart, he’s strong, he’s hard to kill, he’s really good at followin’ orders – they’re thinkin’ asset at this point, turn the guy and keep him.”

“So they’re throwing Captain America away to do it?”

“Yup. Kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth, doesn’t it? But that’s the way the business works. Barnes won’t hesitate to take out a target, no matter who it is or how they tell him to do it. Steve’s not that hard and…well, he _was_ an icon, a really recognizable one, but now he’s not even that.”

Tony winced. He’d forgotten about the Iron Patriot suit, and how that must have looked. “It really wasn’t my idea.”

“I know that, so does Bruce. Steve might even know, but I can’t be sure.” He made a face. “They played us all, kept him away from everyone so they could convince Barnes that Steve really wasn’t anything to SHIELD – or anyone else – but a curiosity or a potential test subject.”

Something about that was bothering Tony. “What about Natasha?”

Clint shrugged. “She’s tryin’ to save Barnes, I think she’s probably pushed everything else out of her mind but that, like it was a mission objective.” He thought for a minute. “It’s hard to explain how Nat works to people who aren’t in the business. She’s no more normal than Barnes is, and they were both trained by the same people, in pretty much the same way – they just got Nat when she was younger.”

Tony was still looking at him. “So she threw you over too?”

“No, from her perspective she’s just movin’ on, because she paid her debt to me so now she doesn’t owe me anything.” He gave Tony a half smile. “If you’re asking if she’d come after me in the field now? Yeah, she would if she was ordered to. I stopped bein’ able to trust her that far the minute Thor dragged his crazy brother back home. Think of it like her marking things off in a ledger: the red column means she owes them, so they’re safe until she pays them back, the black column means they owe her, so they’re a target until that debt is paid, and someone with a zero balance isn’t a concern either way unless the job requires it.”

Tony shivered. “That’s cold.”

Clint shrugged. “That’s how someone like her does what they do without goin’ crazy; they learn to look at life as a balance sheet and act accordingly. For an assassin that’s not only normal, it’s mentally healthy.”

“You?”

Clint chuckled. “I was Army, then CIA after that before I started to work for SHIELD. I’m enhanced, not super, and I don’t have quite the same outlook on things that Nat and Barnes do. I’ll kill someone if killin’ them will make the world a better place, and I’ll kill someone who’s tryin’ to kill me or someone I’m protecting. Outside of that, I’m regular agent-normal not assassin-normal. If that makes sense.”

“It does.” Tony stared out the plane’s windshield, watching the frost outside fight back against the warmth inside at the edges of the glass. “I’m not any kind of normal either, probably more like you than like the rest of them. I think…I’ve done some digging, and I think the reason Howard didn’t want me wasn’t because he didn’t want _me_ , I think it wasn’t his idea to have a kid at all.” He traced his finger over one of the frost-tendrils on the glass nearest him. “I think it was the government’s idea and he wasn’t given a choice, they may have even done some genetic interference beyond that to get the results they wanted – to make sure they’d get someone at least as much of a genius as he was, and maybe a little more than that. I’d like to think that in a similar situation I’d be able to keep my anger over being used that way separate from the kid…but I honestly don’t know if I would or not.”

“You would,” Clint asserted quietly. “Because you’re able to ask yourself the question in the first place, that’s how you know you would. I’m betting your old man never realized there _was_ a question.” 

“No, probably not.” For some reason, that made Tony feel better about it – and not just because Barton had basically just said Tony was a better man than his father. “How long?”

“Twenty-six minutes.” As if on cue, the plane trembled. “And that’s probably where we’ll clock it. Do you see him?”

At first, they didn’t see anything. More minutes ticked by. And then, finally, the black opening in the ice erupted with green as Hulk burst out of the water and climbed out of the icy hole. He roared once he was all the way out, shaking himself like a wet dog, and then stalked over to the plane and plopped down next to it, rearranging the still figure he’d been carrying over one arm and fussing with it. Clint and Tony ran for the door, grabbing their parkas and gloves. Hulk was sitting right beside the door, facing it, and he had Steve cradled against his chest while he tried to take off the bricks the supersoldier had tied to his boots. “Shit,” Clint swore, and jumped in to help, since larger fingers weren’t able to do much with the comparatively small knots in the wet, freezing rope. “Of course he made sure he’d stay down, of course he did.”

Tony had grabbed two blankets from the stack they’d brought with them, but when he got close the still and very blue face of his fellow Avenger gave him pause. Hulk had switched from tugging at the ropes to tearing off Steve’s wet clothes, and then he plucked one of the blankets from Tony’s grasp to wrap around the still body. Clint had gotten his knife in on it and gotten bricks, ropes, and boots out of the way, and once Hulk had made sure there was nothing else hindering him he held Steve up, facing away from him, and patted his back, squeezing a little as he did so. “WATER OUT NOW,” he grunted. He ended up practically turning Steve upside down, but finally the water in the supersoldier’s lungs did come out, splattering on the ground and starting to freeze almost instantly. Hulk immediately pulled Steve close again and wrapped the other blanket around him. He jerked his head at Clint and Tony. “GET PLANE READY, HULK HOLD.” 

Clint shook himself and darted into the plane. Tony jumped in after him, did what he could, and then came back out with another blanket. “Is he…”

“BREATHE WHEN WARM,” Hulk said as though it was obvious. He stroked a large green finger over Steve’s hair and down the side of his face, then took the new blanket and wrapped it over the others. “COLD NOT KILL, JUST MAKE SLEEP.”

“Yeah, probably,” Tony agreed. It was pretty much what had happened the last time, after all. “Are you okay?”

Hulk smiled at him, which would have been a really frightening sight if Tony hadn’t seen it before. “ICE NOT HURT HULK. HURT PUNY MAN WITHOUT SUIT?”

“I probably couldn’t have worn the suit up here even if I still had it,” Tony admitted. “It wasn’t designed to take this kind of cold.” He thought of something.  “You knew that I didn’t have the suit anymore, right?”

“HULK KNOW,” the green behemoth said. “HULK NOT LIKE. SILLY.” He cocked his head, considering Tony. “STILL FRIEND?”

Tony, for some inexplicable reason, felt himself start to tear up – and he stopped himself, because he was pretty sure crying would make his eyes freeze shut or something. “Of course we’re still friends,” he managed, and patted the muscular green arm that was closest to him. “I…I missed you guys. I told myself I was happy, but I wasn’t.”

Hulk nodded, apparently accepting that, and then he pushed Tony with his finger, gently – for Hulk, anyway – shoving him back to the plane. “MAKE BED, MAKE WARM,” he ordered. “HULK HOLD.”

“Okay, I’ll get a spot ready for hi…for both of them,” Tony corrected himself. “Yell if you need something.”

Hulk snorted. “HULK NEED FRIENDS,” he said, almost dismissively. “GOT THEM. HULK ALL GOOD.”

Tony couldn’t help it, he burst out laughing. “That you are, my big green friend, that you are,” he choked out. And before he closed the plane’s door, he saw the Hulk wink at him.

It took about fifteen minutes to get the plane warmed up and ready to take off again, and Tony made the blankets and other things they had into two warm pallets for Steve and Bruce – because it was a given that Hulk was going to have to change back as soon as they were ready to go. Together he and Clint got Steve’s body into the plane and then they went back out. “Okay, big guy,” Tony told the waiting Hulk. “If you’re ready, we’re ready. We’ll see you again soon.”

Hulk made a face at him. “NEED BIGGER PLANE,” he complained, and then collapsed in on himself, leaving a naked, unconscious Bruce in their hold. They quickly hustled Bruce into the plane as well, tucking him in under an electric blanket so he wouldn’t have a chance to get too cold, and then the door was sealed and Clint was taking off, taking them back to civilization.

Tony checked, then checked again, but Steve still wasn’t breathing. He considered the list Bruce had made for him, making sure he had done everything, and then he considered Steve again. Blue, not breathing – for all intents and purposes, drowned _and_ frozen to death. Bruce had said – and so had Hulk, which was something Tony was thinking they might need to have a talk with Bruce about later – that Steve’s serum-enhanced cells would start repairing themselves as they warmed up, and that he’d breathe again once he was warm, but that until then there really wasn’t a whole lot they could do. Tony checked the list again, found something else, and grimaced. Kissing dead supersoldiers wasn’t really his thing, but if warm air going in would speed things up…he leaned over Steve, positioning his head the way Bruce had told him to do it when he’d taught Tony CPR, and then sealed his mouth over cold lips and blew a lungful of air into the motionless chest. He did it a couple more times, letting the air passively wheeze back out each time, and then he blew in the biggest breath he could and quickly replaced his mouth with his hand, effectively sealing the warm air in for a full two minutes.

And then he waited, checking Bruce in the meantime to make sure he was still pink all over, and ten minutes later he went back to Steve and did it again. This time, Steve’s chest rose a little when he blew air in, which Bruce had said was a good sign. Bruce had also said not to breathe into him any more often than every ten or fifteen minutes, so Tony went back to the list and read through it one more time. Then he flipped it over to see if Bruce had written any more instructions on the back. He had, they said, “Yes, now all you can do is wait.”

Tony resisted the urge to kick Bruce while he was sleeping, and settled in next to Steve to count off the eight and a half more minutes before he could breathe into him again.

By the time they made it back to Manhattan, Bruce was awake and dressed and Steve was breathing again, and although the supersoldier was still pale at least it was pale pink instead of pale blue. Bruce had stripped off all but one of the blankets and then added an electric blanket set on low over that. They landed at the private airstrip after dark, and then Tony switched out the plane for a helicopter to get them all back to the Tower.

He had made some calls first, though, and whatever it was whoever he’d called had told him was obviously something he hadn’t wanted to hear. “Slight change of plans,” he told Bruce and Clint. “I’ve got a private elevator in the penthouse, right off the landing pad, and I’ve got us satellite coverage so we won’t show up in all our glory on Google Earth. You two take our formerly double-dead leader down to my safe room while I deal with…things.”

Clint, now piloting the helicopter, frowned. “That bad?”

Tony took a deep breath. “Worse, actually. I had contingency plans in place, so the damage was contained pretty quickly, but I still have to deal with the source of the problem.” He blew out a frustrated breath. “Who is sulking downstairs right now, because the security lockout kept her out of the penthouse level.”

He didn’t want to say any more, and the other two men didn’t press it. Clint landed the helicopter and shut it down, and then he and Bruce carried Steve into the private elevator and Tony gave them a code to put in to make the elevator go to the safe room. The last thing they saw before the door closed was him giving his precious penthouse bar a long look before shaking the temptation off and heading for the other elevator.

The safe room was very much underground and very bunkerish, but it had a decent cot/bed for Steve and plenty of supplies and equipment at hand. Clint helped Bruce get Steve settled, and then went back to the elevator and used the code to get it to open back up for him. “I’m gonna go back him up,” he told Bruce unnecessarily. “She’s halfway to being a supersoldier, who knows what she can do now – and Jarvis doesn’t seem to be around either, and that worries me. You stay with Steve, I’ll come back down once I’ve made sure Tony’s safe.”

Bruce nodded. “I’d say yell if you need me, but I wouldn’t be able to hear you. So don’t need me, okay?”

“I’ll do my best.” And then the elevator closed and he was on his way back up. Clint was thinking hard. “Jarvis?” he asked, and got no response…but had the elevator just slowed a little, almost jerked? He smiled. “Jarvis, I need to get off right above the floor Tony’s currently on – between floors. And if you can open up the access hatch, that would be helpful too.”

Another almost imperceptible jerk, and then a few minutes later the elevator stopped and the doors opened to the shaft instead of the doors on the next floor. Clint patted the elevator wall. “Thanks, buddy. We’ll help him fix whatever she did, get you back good as new. First I have to make sure she doesn’t kill him, though.”

And he knew he hadn’t imagined the shudder he felt at those words. Damn that bitch anyway.

Tony’s elevator shafts were highly secure, but Clint knew his way around that. Jarvis hadn’t, apparently, been able to open the hatch that led into the ductwork between floors, but he had been able to turn off the lasers  and the fans and that was as good as a welcome mat with a key under it for Clint. He got into the ducts and started carefully making his way in. He had a feeling, just a feeling, that Jarvis might have found a way to mark the vent closest to Tony…and his feeling was proved right when after a lot of dark vents into empty rooms he heard the hum of a spinning fan and found it right in front of a backlit vent.

He froze. Pepper was still enhanced, it was entirely possible she’d hear him if he kept moving steadily. So he inched a little bit forward, waited seven seconds, then inched forward some more and waited twenty-six seconds before moving again. He kept moving irregularly until he was right by the fan, and then he stopped again because he didn’t want Pepper to be able to see him through the vent either – not to mention, he wasn’t going to be able to get past the fan without disabling it and once he did that he was going to have to move straight down into the room because his cover would be well and truly blown. And so he listened, waiting for his cue.

It wasn’t long in coming. The fight going on was still verbal and only gradually ratcheting up in volume, but it was still a fight and a pretty nasty one at that. It sounded like everything Tony had ever done wrong, Pepper was throwing back at him, and Clint winced; he and Bruce were going to have more fixing to do than they’d planned. That was okay, though, they could do that. He moved his arm, not making a sound, getting his hand in position to disable the fan. Pepper was sounding more and more agitated, he could even hear her pacing, so she wasn’t going to be content with yelling for too much longer. Sure enough, something smashed against a wall and shattered. It sounded like glass or fine pottery, probably a vase. Tony said he was taking it out of her severance pay, and she sneered that he wasn’t going to be able to fire her or to do much of anything else once she got done with him and that she would ‘keep the company going’ just like she always had. She taunted him for being worthless without the suit and Jarvis to hide behind, and gloated that she’d taken both of those things away from him for good. 

Tony, sadly, was still trying to talk her back around. He loved her, he wanted to save her; Clint got that. But Clint understood something Tony couldn’t, he understood why Pepper would never, ever be able to give up being enhanced. He himself had fought tooth and nail to keep his, albeit for different reasons – he liked to think his were better ones, but someone like Pepper would probably disagree. Someone like Steve wouldn’t, though, and Clint made a mental note to tell him when he got a chance. It might even help the poor guy, knowing that someone else had taken that risk and gotten burned by it even though it had to all appearances paid off in spades.

Clint also made a mental note to let Pepper get one good hit in – or at least a semi-good hit, he wasn’t a masochist – to pay himself back for not noticing Steve was in trouble before the whole thing had reached epic clusterfuck proportions. 

Down below, not knowing that some enhanced backup was almost literally right over his head, Tony was trying to figure a way out of the situation he was in and coming up blank. He’d thought he’d be able to reach Pepper, to reason with her, but once he’d gotten into the room and she’d turned around to face him he’d realized that it probably wasn’t going to happen. Because it sort of looked like she’d gone completely nuts. He kept trying because quitting wasn’t really in him, but the rational part of his mind knew that all he was really doing was dragging it out, possibly buying himself some time.

Time for what, he wasn’t sure. No Jarvis, no suit…and his friends were six stories below ground level and wouldn’t be able to get into this room even if they thought to come up and check on him. Because Pepper had locked the elevator doors, locking Tony in and everyone else out.

She was going to kick his ass. Probably not kill him, but definitely give him the beating of his life and possibly torture him afterwards. Because she _knew_ , because she was the only one he’d ever told, what had been the worst that had happened when he’d been captured and tortured the first time. And because of that, she knew exactly how to break him. It was entirely possible Pepper was going to win this fight all the way around and not just physically.

Weirdly, though, it was that despairing thought that hardened his resolve. Because if she won, if he let her win…then that was it for Bruce and Clint and Steve. Especially Steve, because Pepper would hand him over to Fury in a heartbeat – and because Fury, being that kind of calculating bastard, would happily cover up everything else she’d done in exchange.

Tony couldn’t let that happen. He _wouldn’t_ let that happen.

He kept the taunts small, sarcastic, not personal. He kept moving once she started to move, kept looking for something that would help him. There wasn’t anything, because she’d had more than enough time alone in this room to make sure the advantage was all hers. And she knew it, and they played a slow, almost ridiculous version of cat-and-mouse all over the room until Tony basically cornered himself and just couldn’t go anywhere else. So, Plan B. He sat down.

And leaned back, getting comfortable, and crossed his legs. “Okay, fuck it,” he said, waving one hand in lazy denial when she taunted him about giving up. “I’m tired of playing now, this is boring. If you’re going to kick my ass, here I am. Go for it, get your jollies while it lasts.” He shrugged. “I doubt it will last that long, honestly.”

She smirked at him. “I can make it last a long time.”

He barked out a laugh. “I doubt that. Lack of torture training aside? You’re squeamish as hell, you don’t have the stomach for what you’re threatening to do and we both know it. Beating the hell out of me yes, the rest of it no. So come on, get on with it. I’ve already lost interest, you drew it out too long.” A smirk. “You _know_ how short my attention span is.”

As he had intended, that made her mad. “You…”

“It’s _all_ about me, yes. It always is…and it always will be.” The lie made his heart scream as it broke a little more; it hadn’t all been about him in a long time, he didn’t even want it to be all about him anymore. But he couldn’t tell her that, not now, not ever again. “And nothing you do will make it be about you, nothing. So do whatever you want, it doesn’t matter.”

She loomed over him. “You’re giving up.”

“Yep, sure am.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t give up.”

Tony let himself soften, let her see the pain and the sorrow and the loss, just for a second, because part of him was always going to want to give her one more chance. “I do when it’s you, when it’s this. Even like this, I could never hurt you.”

It was a last-ditch effort…and it didn’t work. She smirked and kicked him in the leg, catching him by surprise and making him yelp. “Luckily I don’t feel the same, or this really would be boring. And I’ve been doing a lot of research on the Internet, just wait until you see what I’ve learned.” She leaned in, offering him a twisted rendition of the smile that had once meant it was time to play. “You can condition yourself not to be squeamish, you know.”

The open-handed slap took him by surprise too, rocking his head back on his neck, and then she kicked him again, this time in the other leg. She was obviously getting off on hurting him, and he felt sick to his stomach. Suddenly, though, she froze and looked up at the ceiling…and then there was a crash and something small and metal and relatively aerodynamic flew through the air and cut her cheek, making her stagger back in surprise with a yell of pain and anger. Clint Barton hit the ground in a crouch beside Tony’s chair and stood up like a cobra rising to strike. He grinned at her. “Why don’t you show _me_ what you’ve learned? Then I can teach you better.”

Pepper howled and rushed him. Clint dodged the rush with almost insulting ease and flipped her – away from the chair, Tony couldn’t help but notice. “That’s it? Really?”

She tried it again, going in swinging. Clint blocked most of the hits but let her – _let_ her, it was pretty obvious – get one in before tripping her and backing off. “That one’s for Steve,” he said. “Because I let him down. That’s the only freebie you get, though. And were you researching anything on the Internet other than S &M and torture porn? Because I could so tell you enjoyed slapping him. Gave you a tiny little lady boner, didn’t it? I bet you’ve been fantasizing about slapping him around all this time. Every time he acted like a jerk, were you just holding it all in until you could go off alone someplace and get off imagining him tied down and taking it from you?”

She turned bright red; Tony was horrified. “ _Pepper_?!”

Clint used the distraction to deliver a punch that sent her halfway across the room. “Somehow I don’t think playing with me is gonna give you the same rush.”

Pepper rolled back to her feet. “I can kill you.”

“Sadly, I think you really believe that.” They closed again, Pepper seemingly doing a little better this time and getting more confident. Which made her surprise almost comical when he again dumped her on her ass. And again. She started throwing things at him; he ducked most of them and ignored the rest. She tried to make a feint for Tony, and Clint clotheslined her, letting her get in another mostly ineffective hit in the process. She kicked one of his legs out from under him and he rolled, sweeping her off her feet with the same move and then coming up when she did and getting her by the throat. “Strength isn’t everything,” he said evenly, ignoring the kicks and batting aside the hand that tried to go for his eyes. He finally pinned that wrist and squeezed, and she howled in pain. “I will _make_ you be nice, since right now force is the only thing you understand.” He gave her a little shake. “How did you turn Jarvis off? Because he’s mute and pissed at you, and he’s still got some control over the building’s systems so there’s no way in hell he’ll let you leave this room and live.” Another shake, harder this time. “He’s the one who let me in here, you know. He is _very_ upset that you wanted to hurt his creator. Tony could probably talk him out of killing you, but to do that Tony has to be able to talk to him. So turn him. Back. On.”

She choked when his hand tightened. “How do you know I won’t…destroy him?”

Clint grinned at her. “Because if you could, you’d have already done it. Because you’re a vindictive power-addicted bitch. So?”

She pulled at his hand and he loosened his grip just a bit. She choked out, “Jarvis…talk to me,” and then broke out of Clint’s grasp and kneed him in the stomach; Tony thought she’d probably been trying for a lower target, but she’d miscalculated. Clint dropped, but he was still able to roll away from the kick she tried to follow up with, and then he rolled back up to his feet. He was still grinning. “Okay then, bring it. Let’s see what you can _really_ do.”

What happened next looked impressively, disturbingly like what happens in a video game when one fighting character is being played by a teenage boy and the other one by his six-year-old brother. Pepper still got in a few more lucky hits, but within minutes she was on the ground and not getting back up. Clint straightened, wincing, and swiped at the little trickle of blood coming from one corner of his mouth. “Sorry Tony,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll help you clean up the mess later.”

Tony swallowed. “I…have people for that, don’t worry about it,” he managed. He took a step forward, still wary of Pepper even though she looked out for the count. “Are you okay?” Clint nodded. “She’s still…you could have…”

“I wouldn’t have done that.” Clint shook his head. “Remember: Regular-agent normal, I don’t kill people unless I have a good reason. And I wouldn’t have done it in front of you anyway unless I didn’t have any other choice.”

“Thanks for that.” Tony looked up then and asked, not quite plaintively, “Jarvis?”

“Are you all right, sir?”

Tony was so visibly relieved Clint thought for a minute he was going to cry. “Yeah, I’m okay. Are…are _you_ alright?”

“Fine, sir. The lockout Ms. Potts initiated was clumsy at best. And I have notified security that the situation is now under control, they are on their way up.”

Tony nodded slowly. “Okay, good. Call an ambulance, and make a report that says I’m not pressing charges even though she tried to assault me for firing her. Be sure to put in there that she was fired for refusing to get off the drugs.”

“Already done, sir.” A pause. “I have notified Dr. Banner that all is well. He says he will administer first-aid to Agent Barton once he returns, and that if he tells you he is ‘fine’ you should hit him with the nearest appropriate blunt object.”

“Tell Bruce to be nice,” Clint said. “And he can do all the first-aid he wants once I get back down there, but for right now lookin’ battered is gonna help Tony out a lot once security gets here with the cops.” He rolled his eyes at Tony’s raised eyebrow. “Of course they called the cops, Tony – you fired her, and then she disabled your security system and locked you in a room with her. I’m surprised SWAT isn’t outside right now.”

“I told them such firepower was not needed, Agent Barton, because you were present and had the situation under control.”

Clint righted a chair that was still mostly intact and dropped down into it, chuckling. “Jarvis, man, you are something else. Thank you, I appreciate it.”

“Any time, Agent Barton.”

 The police were there for about an hour, asking questions and gathering evidence – they probably would have been there longer, but Jarvis very helpfully offered them video of the fight. Which Pepper had apparently set up to record so she would have it to watch later, he had her on tape saying it. That revelation had made Tony turn almost as green as the Hulk, he’d actually thrown up in a trashcan and then sat there on the floor for a few minutes clutching the rim of the can in a white-knuckled grip with one hand while the other covered his eyes. Clint sat down beside him with a reassuring arm around his shoulders, just sat there and warned off the concerned police and worried security people with a shake of his head. “She’d started smackin’ him around before I got here, and she threatened him with torture,” he told them quietly. “She said she was gonna make it last for a long time. And when I accused her of gettin’ off on hurtin’ him…she blushed. He turned about three shades of white, I’m surprised he didn’t get sick then.”

“Research on the Internet, you think?” one of the cops, the detective, asked.

Clint nodded. “She said she had been, yeah.”

“We’ll call ahead to the shrink, then,” the detective told him. “We get ‘em like this sometimes, goddamned movie people don’t realize what kind of shit they’re leaving us to clean up when they make that crap.” He crouched down. “Mr. Stark?” Tony uncovered one eye  to look at him. “Bellevue has seen this before, they know how to handle it – and since you reconsidered about pressing charges she won’t be getting out anytime soon to try it again, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

Tony uncovered the other eye. “The drug she’s been taking gave her super powers,” he warned hoarsely.

The cop patted his arm. “They can handle that too, don’t worry about it. Agent Barton, you sure you don’t need the hospital? You look pretty rough.”

“Nah, I’ve had a hell of a lot worse than this,” Clint disclaimed for him with a lopsided grin. “It’s nothin’ that won’t heal on its own, believe me. You guys need anything else from us right now?”

“No, we’re good. Have the British guy call us if you find anything else she did, though.”

He stood up, and Clint carefully pulled a still-shaky Tony up too. Tony did manage to almost smile at the detective. “I will,” he said. “Jarvis?”

“Of course, sir,” Jarvis answered immediately, and Clint felt a little more tension leave Tony’s body at the prompt response; oh yeah, he and Bruce had a _lot_ of fixing to do. “Detective Martinez, would you prefer that I contact you through email or on your cell phone?”

Martinez’ eyes widened…and then he grinned. “Text me if you find anything,” he said. “I’ll get back to you as quick as I can.”

“Of course, Detective.” 

Martinez left after that, herding the rest of the cops out with him, and Clint herded the rest of Tony’s security people out too after giving them some specific instructions that Tony wasn’t in the right frame of mind to think of giving them himself. And then he pulled Tony to the elevator and started to get in when the doors opened…and then he stopped. “Jarvis,” he said conversationally, “What’s going to happen if Tony gets on this elevator?”

“I will cut all power and it will plummet down the shaft in an uncontrolled drop, Agent Barton.”

“I had wondered, thanks.” Clint raised an eyebrow at Tony, who had gone funny-colored again. “Can you fix that, or are we takin’ the stairs?”

Tony shook himself. “Taking the…are you insane?! That’s almost eighty floors!”

“Yeah, which I’d rather climb down than fall down.”

“Point. And yes, it’s fixable. I have contingency plans for…this sort of thing, even if I didn’t ever expect it to happen.” He took a deep breath and pulled off his shirt, baring his arc reactor, and then he walked across the room to stand in front of one of the well-concealed cameras. “Jarvis, scan me. I need you to check the reactor core for…code irregularities.”

“Certainly, sir.” A flat red beam of light came out of the camera and played over the arc reactor. And kept playing. Clint moved in a little closer, worried, but a miniscule shake of Tony’s head stopped him from doing anything. A few more minutes ticked by. And then Tony’s arc reactor blinked three times, and so did the lights in the room. “Scan completed,” Jarvis intoned, his voice sounding unusually flat. “No code irregularities detected.”

“Thank you. Now put yourself into maintenance mode and run a complete self-diagnostic,” Tony instructed. “Send all reports to the main terminal, I’ll manually reactivate control of all systems one at a time as I approve them.”

“Understood.”

The lights flickered, and Tony pulled his shirt back on. He went back to the terminal in the room and tapped on it a few times, and the lights flickered again. “Okay,” he called over his shoulder to Clint. “Jarvis is…well, let’s say he’s asleep. The Tower is just a building, with no A.I., until I wake him up again.” 

Clint ambled over. “What are the chances she tampered with somethin’ _not_ A.I. related?”

Tony snorted. “No chance at all. That would require engineering skills, which P…which she doesn’t have.” He slapped the other man on the shoulder with imitation hardiness. “Come on, let’s go let Bruce get his first aid thing on, you really do look like shit right now.”

If Tony hesitated a fraction of a second stepping into the elevator, Clint didn’t hold it against him; he was too busy calculating whether or not an eighty-story free-fall would give him enough time to climb out of the elevator with Tony and jump off.

 

It was two days later when Jarvis, repaired back to his old reliable self, told Tony that Director Fury needed to speak with him about an urgent matter. Tony didn’t even have to guess what the urgent matter was; they’d been expecting this call. He told Jarvis to let Clint and Bruce know, and then composed himself and had the video call patched through to the terminal he was on. “You’re calling me why? No suit, no super alien-fighting powers, no good to SHIELD, wasn’t that what I was told? So were you calling to borrow money or what?” 

Fury looked irritated. “No, we’re trying to track down Captain Rogers, I thought you might know where he was. Someone wants to talk to him…”

“Tell Barnes to sit on it and spin,” Bruce said, leaning over Tony’s shoulder so he could look into the camera. “Steve went back home. For good.”

 Fury shook his head. “He’s not in Brooklyn.”

“He went home…to the ice,” Tony corrected quietly. “We didn’t get there in time to stop him.”

Openmouthed shock almost immediately gave way to anger. “Why didn’t you tell us?! We could have…”

“Done what, dragged him back, thrown him in a cell, maybe taken him out and strapped him to an exam table a few times a week so your researchers could run tests?” Bruce asked acidly. “SHIELD wanted Barnes so badly they were willing to sacrifice a good man who hadn’t done anything wrong just to keep him happy, why do you _think_ we didn’t tell you?”

Fury stiffened. “Barnes can be an invaluable asset, to the entire planet.”

Bruce just looked at him. “Steve already was. Admit it, you saw the opportunity to replace your super-soldier with a super-assassin, and if said assassin wasn’t now wanting to see his former best friend you wouldn’t care where Steve was or what he was doing.”

“That isn’t true, Banner.”

“It is.” Clint leaned into the camera pickup and waved. “You fuckin’ burned him, Fury – I saw the footage from the security cameras you were lettin’ Barnes watch so you could convince him that he’d be the big deal here and his former buddy wasn’t anything special. Oh, and while you’re on the line: Fuck you, I quit – actually I quit before we went to try to save Steve, but I just wanted to tell you to your face.”

Fury rolled his eyes. “We’ll talk later, Barton. You know you can’t quit.”

“I know you can’t stop me.” Clint withdrew from the camera’s pickup range again. “Tony, Bruce, I’m outta here.”

“Enjoy Aruba,” Tony called back over his shoulder, which resulted in some cursing from the direction the archer had gone in. “You’re welcome, pick a better hiding place!”

“I’d say fuck you, Stark, but you might take me up on it,” Clint’s voice came back. “Okay, your fancy beach house is safe.”

“It is a really nice beach house,” Tony told Fury. “If I’d let him hide there, I wouldn’t have been able to use it again.” He shrugged. “He’s young and violent, he can find another place to hide that won’t deprive me of a private white-sand beach in paradise.” 

Fury visibly gritted his teeth. “I’ll track him down and straighten him out later. Right now, I need Rogers – no matter what condition he’s in. Were you able to retrieve him? You had Banner with you, surely the Hulk…” He reacted to Bruce shaking his head with a scowl. “No?”

“We couldn’t save your precious Captain America windup toy, Fury,” Tony told him. “He’s gone, that’s it. Guess it’s a good thing you already had his replacement lined up.” He cocked his head. “Just out of curiosity…what the hell did you think his reaction was going to be to everything you were doing? To just roll over and take it? Because yeah, he was a fighter, but he was also human and pretty damned young. Did you think you could knock him down that way less than a year after he woke up 70 years in the future after being _dead_ and he’d just shrug it off?”

Fury ignored the rhetorical question. “So you failed to retrieve Captain Rogers, is that what you’re telling me?”

“I’m telling you that Captain Rogers committed suicide two days ago, you bastard,” Tony spat at him, and then had to swipe at his eyes. “The only one who failed here was you. I think you should be getting pretty used to that, though. Oh, and Pepper is fired, and she’s still hooked on Extremis; I’d say go pick her up from Bellevue and recruit her quick before she escapes and becomes a supervillian or something.”

“I’ll consider it.” Fury considered him. “So you’re going back to being Iron Man, then?”

Tony snorted. “No. I blew up all my suits, remember? I’m sure you heard all about it when Pepper started calling up other superheroes and telling them we couldn’t be friends anymore because of the deal I made with her – which of course played into your plans for destroying Captain Rogers just perfectly.” He swiped at his eyes again. “I’m done talking to you. I’ve lost two people I was close to over the past few days, and I am just not in the mood to deal with your shit right now. Sayonara and fuck you, Fury.”

He disconnected, then looked over his shoulder at Bruce…who nodded and patted his shoulder. “Steve can share his Oscar with you.”

Tony shrugged. “It was all true: Captain America is dead, he’s been dead for a while, probably. Captain Rogers is dead too, he killed himself in the Arctic two days ago. And the cold-blooded one-eyed bastard didn’t ask me about Steve, so I didn’t tell him.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Made any progress on how we’re going to hide him? He could live here in the Tower forever, but I don’t think he’d enjoy it.”

“You won’t be able to pry him out of the Tower for a while anyway, or even out of the room he’s in right now, so it’s not an immediate issue,” Bruce informed him. Steve had woken up the day after they’d rescued him, so emotionally broken that all of them had wondered at least once if rescuing him had really been the right thing to do. “He’s not going to bounce back from this anytime soon – and especially not if Fury makes Barnes the new Captain America.”

Tony shrugged again, because with Steve ‘dead’ that was pretty much a given. “Barnes is welcome to it – in fact, I think the bastard deserves it, because he obviously thought Steve had an easy ride on the icon train and a dose of reality should be good for him. You think Natasha will figure out what’s going on, though?”

“Yeah, eventually.” Clint stepped back into the room, leaning on the doorframe. “But she won’t say anything. She’s got Barnes, they’ll get to work as a team again, and they’ll be mostly immune from anyone in SHIELD goin’ after the two of them once Barnes starts wearing the red-white-and-blue suit.” He pulled a sad face. “So I can’t go to Aruba?”

“Only if we all go,” Tony told him. “Which we’ll do this winter, after I get things running smoothly in Stark Industries again.”

“Bruce and I can help with that,” Clint assured him. “Steve can too, once he’s feeling better. We’ll all pitch in, it’ll be fine.” He peeled himself off the doorframe and ambled over, and to Tony’s surprise dropped a hand on his shoulder. “Honestly, the three of us were all getting’ old for the superhero game anyway, and Steve had done it long enough. Nothing wrong with goin’ out at the top of our game.”

“No, there’s not,” Bruce agreed, and put his hand on Tony’s other shoulder. “And if we really need the superhero muscle for something, we’ve still got the Other Guy. I have to let him out sometimes anyway or he gets antsy.”

Tony took a deep breath, and covered their hands with his own. The gesture felt odd, but good.  “We’re all agreed, then. And since I have to do something about what’s left of the place in Malibu anyway, I may just move Stark Industries’ headquarters out there. It’ll get us away from SHIELD’s reindeer games in New York, and there’s enough land out there that the Hulk can run around or go play in the ocean without anybody being bothered by it.”

Clint grinned. “Another private beach?”

Tony shrugged. “Is there any other kind?” He stood up and straightened his t-shirt out. “Let’s go tell Steve he’s now technically a free man.”

 

Down in the lowest level of Stark Tower’s sub-basements, in Tony’s most private, most secure workshop’s living area, Steve Rogers was asleep. He also wasn’t alone, and the tall, goateed man with the elaborate cape straightened away from his appraisal of the sleeping supersoldier when the other three men entered and immediately went into defensive mode. “I am not a threat to him – or to you,” the man said, and gave a short half-bow. “I am Stephen Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme. I heard…the young one’s pain is echoing through the multiverse, word of it reached me and I came to see if I could help.” He shook his head. “Things were not supposed to happen this way. You know that, correct?”

“No, we don’t,” Tony told him. “Things happen because they happen. Now how did you get in here?”

Strange shrugged. “Magic. And no, they don’t, not always. Sometimes things happen because something or someone…interfered.” He switched his attention to Bruce. “I was a doctor, a surgeon, before I became the Sorcerer Supreme. The ways you are thinking of, they will not help you hide him, they cannot give him a new life. Not to mention, you would be hurting him unnecessarily because his body would reject the changes anyway.”

Bruce nodded slowly. “I was considering plastic surgery, yes. And I was afraid that would be the outcome, so it was going to be a last resort.”

“The serum was a terrible thing,” Strange said, shaking his head. “Most especially because they did not know exactly what it did, so the boy had no warning and no way to prepare himself.”

“He wanted his chance, and the serum gave him that,” Clint corrected. “He knew he was takin’ a risk. He knew what could happen if it went wrong.”

“There was no way for it to go right,” Strange disagreed. “Human beings are not meant to be immortal – and you are not, Dr. Banner,” he inserted quickly. “Your other form may be immune to harm, but your original body will age and, eventually, die as any normal man does. Young Steven, however…”

“Because his cells are continuously repairing themselves back to the exact condition they were in when the serum took over, he’ll never get any older – basically, he’s stuck,” Bruce finished for him. “We know that, so does he.” He waved a hand, indicating the sleeping man. “Hence the current problem. We can’t hide him forever. And even if we could, eventually we’re all going to be gone.” He sighed. “Which can only end one of two ways: Someone will have figured it out and they’ll capture him, or he’ll get away and go back up north, only with nobody around to stop him. And then of course someone will eventually find him in the ice and it will start all over again.”

Strange nodded. “It will be as you say it.”

Tony raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Unless? I’ve heard this sort of thing before, there’s always an ‘unless you do what I want you to do’ involved.” He folded his arms over his chest. “Go ahead, spit it out.”

To their surprise, this made Strange laugh. It was a very normal-sounding laugh, at odds with his appearance, and once he got control of himself again he shook his head. “Oh by all the gods Above and Below, you really are like me – or rather, like I used to be,” he managed. He smiled. “Of course there is an ‘unless’, but only because there may be something I can do.” He straightened, good humor falling away. “The serum is an either/or proposition, as Dr. Banner well knows,” he said. “It is either in his cells…or it isn’t.”

Tony exchanged a look with Clint. It couldn’t be that simple…could it? “Bruce?” he asked. “You can do that?”

“No,” Bruce answered immediately. “No, I can’t. I’ve tried different things to get it out of mine, and I finally had to give up because you just can’t replace every cell in your body at once.”

“You can’t,” Strange agreed. “I can’t either, even with magic. But the serum is a substance, a substance which caused young Steven’s cells to grow in a particular way, which in turn triggered certain physiological changes. We cannot – obviously – remove all of the affected cells. But it may be possible to have the serum itself removed from the cells.” He made a face. “I know of a daemon which may be able to do this; it devours immortality, you might think of it as a control which keeps immortals from overrunning the universe. I can summon this daemon and ask it to aid us…but before I do that, you must know that removing the serum, removing his immortality, would also reverse the physiological changes the serum triggered and put him back to what he was before it was given to him.”

“So he wouldn’t just stop being immortal…”

“…He’d go back to being unhealthy too.” Bruce considered it. “Most of the things that were wrong with him are things we can easily treat now, though.” He frowned, then walked over to the bed and moved the sorcerer to one side so he could sit down. Then he started shaking Steve awake. “Steve, wake up,” he demanded gently. “We need to talk. Come on, wake up.”

Steve sighed. “Bruce, what?” he murmured, raising one hand to rub sleep out of his eyes. “Is something…”

“No, nothing is wrong per se,” Bruce assured him. “Fury called a little while ago, he was looking for you. He said Barnes wanted to talk to you.”

Clint crossed the room to join them. “Tony told him you were dead,” the archer said. “Bruce told him to tell Barnes to sit on it and spin. I just told him to fuck off.”

That lit the barest spark of amusement in the blue eyes. “Thanks, guys. And thank Tony for me.”

“You’re welcome.” Tony joined them, standing behind Clint, frowning. “You know they’re probably going to give Barnes your suit, right?”

Steve shrugged, the spark going out again. “It wasn’t my suit anymore anyway.”

“You were the guy who wore it first,” Bruce corrected him. “And you’ll probably always be the guy who wore it best.” He ruffled his friend’s hair. “Steve, do you want to stay dead?” He got a nod, which he had expected. “Well, we’ve been trying to figure out how to make that happen, and we keep getting stuck. Because we can only hide you, realistically, for so long.”

“Not to mention, you deserve better than being trapped in my basement for the next fifty years,” Tony added. “But if you go outside,” he didn’t miss the shudder, “someone is eventually going to recognize you. With us so far?”

Steve nodded, and slowly pushed himself upright, drawing up his knees and wrapping his arms around them. “So I’m still stuck, and now so are you. We can’t win.”

“We didn’t say that,” Clint corrected him. “We said we can’t hide you _like this_ and have it work.”

“Someone showed up who thinks he might be able to help, though,” Bruce said. He scooted a little, letting Steve see Strange. “This guy was a doctor, now he says he’s the Sorcerer Supreme…”

“…Whatever that is…”

“Thank you, Tony, but yes, whatever that is,” Bruce agreed. “Whatever it is, though, he thinks he might be able to help.”

Steve sighed again. “But?”

“But you wouldn’t have the serum anymore if it worked. Which means you wouldn’t have anything the serum gave you, either.”

Steve frowned, thinking about it. He looked around Bruce at Strange. “Sorcerer, really?”

Strange nodded. “I’m actually from a different reality than you are, young Steven, a different branch of the greater multiverse. But what happened here was not meant to happen, and the effects of it are already resonating throughout the multiverse, through all the versions of you that exist. When I was made aware of it…” He considered for a moment, then appeared to make a decision. “I went to the version of you who exists in my own reality, and I spoke with him at length. He said that he understood your feelings in this situation completely, and that he did not condemn you for trying to end things – in fact, he said he would keep that idea in mind, just in case things ever became that bad for him personally.” He smiled sadly. “A good man, our Captain America – older than you by at least a decade, but he has many allies who will live as long if not longer than he will, so he has no fears of having to go on alone at the present time. He would have come with me if it had been possible.”

Steve cocked his head. “If I met him in person the universe would explode?”

That made Strange laugh again. “Not quite, but it might have the effect of killing every version of you everywhere, so we decided not to risk it.” He moved closer, standing right behind Bruce – Tony and Clint both tensed, but he ignored them. “Young Steven, I might know of a being who can remove the curse of immortality from you, thus solving the current problem, at least in part. I can summon him in an instant to request it. But as I told your friends, the serum is an either/or proposition. You either have it, or you don’t.”

“And without it I’d be a worthless, sickly weakling again, right?”

“Far from worthless – and, from what I have seen and heard, far from weak,” Strange corrected immediately. “And the medical conditions which afflicted you are easily treatable in your reality in the present time period. The question is, do you truly want to start over?”

Slowly, Steve nodded. “I wish I could start over,” he said. “What I was…isn’t needed here anymore. But I don’t know what I’d do.”

“We’re helpin’ Tony fix his company, first off,” Clint told him. “I already volunteered you.”

Disbelieving blue eyes swung to Tony, who nodded. “I had to fire Pepper, she…she hadn’t given up the drugs, she _refused_ to give up the drugs,” he said. By mutual agreement, they hadn’t told Steve any of that story and weren’t planning on sharing it all with him any time soon. “I’m not going back to being Iron Man again, though – as Clint so tactlessly pointed out, the rest of us are getting a little old to keep doing the superhero gig. So these two are going to help me change the world from inside Stark Industries instead.” He raised an eyebrow. “Want to help?”

“ _I_ can help? But what…”

“You were smart, and tactical, before the serum,” Bruce reminded him, and Strange confirmed that with a nod. “You also have more PR training than any of us, probably including Tony…”

“Hey!”

“…and that alone is gonna be worth its weight in gold around here soon. So yes, you can most definitely help.”

Steve nodded, and then for the first time since he’d woken up from his second encounter with the ice his jaw set and some of the life returned to his eyes. “I…if you’re sure…then yes, please take the serum away. I don’t want it. I…I just want it to be over, to have a normal life.”

Strange shook his head. “I doubt your life will ever be very normal, considering who you live with. But let us see if we can at least give you a normal life span, in a normal, mortal body.”

He stepped back, grasped the jeweled medallion around his neck and started to chant in some arcane, unrecognizable language. Power flared, and suddenly a scaly bluish-green…creature appeared in front of him. It bowed, but it was frowning. “Sorcerer Supreme, why have you summoned me?” it asked in a guttural yet somewhat sibilant voice.

“I have a favor to ask,” the sorcerer replied, bowing himself. “An old acquaintance of mine’s younger self in this reality has had his destiny interfered with, by who or what I am unsure. But he is also afflicted with immortality, a particularly cruel circumstance given the path his altered reality has now taken.”

“And so you sent for me, I see.” The creature turned and looked at Steve, and it sniffed. “I know of this one. He asked for the curse, it was his choice.”

“Look deeper,” Strange suggested. “This one did not choose what has happened to him, nor did the one who offered the serum and administered it. And even still, I would not be making this request of you if it were not for the interference which has occurred.”

The creature sniffed again, then frowned and moved closer. “You are correct, Sorcerer,” it finally said. “The young one is blameless, save for wishing to serve as he had been served, to protect as he had been protected. I will aid him.”

“I will be in your debt, and grateful for it,” was the sorcerer’s reply. “Steven?”

Steve looked up at the creature, which was looking back at him with obvious sympathy. “Please,” he finally said. “If you can really take it…please.”

The creature moved again, and took the spot Bruce reluctantly vacated on the side of the bed. It lifted its hands, which had six fingers each tipped with curved, lilac-colored claws. “May I touch?” it asked. “I will not harm you, but physical contact will allow me to better see what I must do.”

“Sure.” Steve closed his eyes, though, as the clawed hands settled on either side of his head. The creature hummed under its breath for a few moments, and then withdrew its hands. “I can take this from you,” it said. Then it smiled – revealing a mouthful of sharp teeth. “Ask, young one. Your curiosity does not offend me.”

Steve blinked at it. “What are you?”

“In the terms of your science in this reality, I am an extradimensional being,” it answered. “I come from a dimension outside of your own, and therefore am not bound by your physical laws. In the Sorcerer Supreme’s reality I would be called a daemon, although the word has a far different meaning for him than what you would think of it here. And among my own kind, I am thought of as a healer of sorts, and also as a keeper of justice.”

“Justice?”

“Like you, I have no love for those who prey upon the weak. Many who reach for immortality are of that sort, and I take great pleasure in destroying them.” It shrugged. “Few understand my duty, or that of my brethren.”

“I do,” Steve told it, looking miserable and like he was trying not to curl back in on himself. “Thank you for answering my question.”

The sharp smile again, and the creature patted his head. “Honest curiosity is a virtue, young one; may you never outgrow it.” It helped him lay back down, making sure he was comfortable. “Now, let us remove this curse from you, that your friends may have the friend they have in you returned to them whole and unbroken.” A pause. “There will be some pain, but I will make it as little as possible for you. I do not do so for those who are unworthy.”

“Thank you,” Steve repeated. “And I can take it. I…I did before.”

“So you did.” The creature ran its hands down the length of his body, and then one hand came to rest in the center of his chest while the other pressed down on his forehead. Its hands and eyes started to glow, and Steve started to tremble. His hands clenched into fists at his sides, every muscle tensing tighter and tighter…and then he convulsed. The creature shook its head sharply. “Cry out if you must,” it ordered. “To hold in the pain is to hold in the thing you wish me to remove. Let it out!”

And Steve screamed. It wasn’t a very long scream, and as soon as it was over there was a bright flash of light…and when everyone had blinked their vision back into working Steve Rogers was laying limp on the bed and was half his serum-enhanced size in a puddle of too-large clothes. The creature remained as it was a moment more, then lifted its hands and put them back on either side of the now-smaller man’s head. It sat there for a long moment, and then withdrew and stood up, patting Steve’s chest as it moved away. “He is brave,” it said quietly. “And strong, and his heart is pure and true. Take good care of him,” it told the three shocked, staring men. “He deserves to know contentment, and the love of those who value him for his faults as well as his virtues.” And with that it turned back to the sorcerer, bowed, and disappeared.

Strange watched the three men approach the bed, approved as they all managed to sit down on it at once, getting as close to the now-small man lying there as they could, all touching him gently to make sure he was uninjured. The sorcerer smiled. “Your reality will continue now, and so will mine,” he said, and nodded when three heads jerked up in alarm at those words. “I can say no more. I can, however…” He waved one hand, and a small pile of documents appeared on a nearby table. “Identification, because some eyes will be watching to see if you try to create any for a supposedly dead man – his other, older self thought of it and assisted me in providing what would be needed. Keep him inside and unseen for three months, and then it will be safe for him to rejoin the world again in small steps. I would suggest returning to college as a good place to start.”

“We’ll keep that in mind.” Tony looked at Steve and then back at the sorcerer. “I don’t know whether we should be thanking you or not, not yet…but if we should be, then thanks.”

“What he said,” came from Clint, who was running his fingers through his unconscious friend’s hair; Strange suspected he was checking to see if the daemon’s claws had done any damage. “He didn’t deserve…what happened, what they did to him. So thanks.”

“From me too,” Bruce said simply. “He’ll get his fresh start, and we’ll make sure it’s a good one. Thank your Captain America for us too.” He frowned. “Can you tell us about…”

“No, I can’t tell you what will or would have happened,” Strange said. And then he smiled, not quite nicely. “I can, however, tell you that you need not look for revenge against the new ‘hero’ or the version of Nicholas Fury you have here. Their failings will bring their own punishment, and you have more worthy concerns. Be well, all of you. And share in the blessing of contentment which was given to young Steven.”

And then there was a flash of light, and he was gone. The three men looked at each other, shrugged, and went back to making sure their teammate, their friend, was all right. “Our reality will continue.” Clint murmured softly. “Good to know, I guess.”

Tony and Bruce both nodded, agreeing with him. That was a good thing to know.

 

Back in his own dimension, Strange reappeared and found his own version of Captain America pacing the floor. He smiled tiredly and dropped into the nearest chair. “It is done. The serum was removed, his friends rally around him, and everyone’s reality will continue despite whoever’s meddling. Oh, and they send their thanks for your assistance.”

The older Steve Rogers snorted. “Younger me may not thank me when he sees what his new name is, but I…I thought it would fit, maybe even inspire him some, after what you told me.”

“And I agreed with your reasoning.” Strange sighed, eyeing his friend with no little sympathy. “They are all very different men than the versions here. I am sorry, Captain.”

The other man shrugged. “I’m telling myself to just be glad that there’s some universe where Stark isn’t a miserable, drunken bastard.”

“No, in their reality that was his father,” Strange agreed, nodding, and changed the subject. “How is Bucky?” 

“Shaken by what he sees as a really close call,” the older Steve admitted, finally sitting down himself. “If they’d handled his deprogramming differently…”

“It still wouldn’t have made a difference – here or there,” the sorcerer assured him. “Tell him I said so, and, in this at least, I really do know all. That other man is not him at all, except in name. I was honestly shocked by how different the two of them are, the divergence there is really startling. It’s possible even his parentage was different.”

“I’ll tell him.” Older Steve relaxed back in his chair, getting comfortable, and smiled at his friend. “Go on, go to sleep. We’ve got the house until you recover from hopping dimensions, nothing but nothing is getting to you unless it goes through all of us first. You can tell me more, if you want to, when you wake up.”

Strange raised an eyebrow at him. “You promise not to attempt to cook breakfast? For anyone, including yourself?”

Older Steve made a face at him. “Didn’t you promise you’d never mention that incident again? But yeah, okay – and anyway, I’ve been assured that the pancake house down the street delivers. Can the other me cook?”

“I believe so, yes. And they do deliver, but they don’t do omelets well so I’d avoid that section of the menu.” Strange waved his hand and the chair he was sprawled in became a comfortable chaise lounge. “I’ll happily tell you – and Bucky – anything else I can about the other reality once I’m recovered. And thank you for guarding my house.”

“Thank _you_ for saving our life,” older Steve told him, smiling. “Or lives, however that works. Now go on, go to sleep, we’ve got this.”

And since Captain America was nothing if not a man of his word, Stephen Strange did as he was told and let himself fall into a deep, healing sleep. It had, after all, been a very long day. 

  

_Five years later…_

The Third Annual World Science Expo was in full swing, and everything was running smoothly. A short blond man with a clipboard was speaking earnestly with the people manning the main visitor information booth about some last-minute changes to the schedule of events, and once he was done he said something that made them all smile and then left the booth, riffling through papers on his clipboard as he walked away. He stopped to check on a little knot of people who looked lost and got them moving in the right direction again, greeted a few stragglers coming in and sent them to the information booth, and then hurried down a corridor that followed the windowed wall around the outside of the building, heading for the next thing on his list that he needed to attend to.

The corridor was bright, windows set almost higher than his head filling the sterile, empty space with the distinctive golden sunlight of another perfect afternoon on the California coast. And so it was a surprise to him when a shadow he hadn’t seen detached itself from the wall and grabbed him.

It was also, apparently, a surprise for the shadow when he flipped it over his shoulder and then hit it with the clipboard when it bounced back up. The resulting fight was short and hard and he lost, but he smiled at the sound of his captor breathing heavily behind him, even though they were holding a knife to his throat. “What are you, stupid?” he asked. “If you had a question you could have just walked up and asked me, you know.” He moved slightly, angling around so he could see the other person’s face, but when the knife pressed a little harder he stopped and relaxed again. “Okay, have it your way. How’s it going, Natasha?”

He felt her tense, but instead of answering him she spoke to someone else. “I have him.”

“I had her first!” he called back, knowing the earpiece she was wearing would pick it up. “Better hurry up and get out here, your window of opportunity is closing fast.”

“Shut up,” she ordered him, sounding annoyed, and he smiled happily. He heard her sigh. “He’s right, get over here. Before I kill him.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right – if you haven’t done it already, you aren’t going to.”

“We can find out what we need to know from your body.”

“No, you can’t.”

Another sigh. “He was right, you have no self-preservation instinct at all.”

He smirked. “Fury or Bucky?” A man slipped into the corridor. “Asked and answered.” He waved. “Hey buddy, long time no see. Next time just call me, we’ll do lunch.”

The man stalked up to him and glared down. “How did you do it, Steve?”

Steve shrugged, and then folded his arms across his chest when the knife pressed in. “What’s the matter, tired of being immortal? And that still doesn’t explain why this,” he jerked a thumb at the assassin holding the knife to his throat, “was something you thought was necessary.”

The man who had once been his best friend shrugged. “If you weren’t hiding something, you wouldn’t have pretended to be dead. Fury said detain and question you, and get you back to headquarters for further testing and a full debriefing.”

All of the amusement drained out of the smaller man. “If Fury wanted cooperation, maybe he shouldn’t have played games with me to get you on his side.” His voice was icy, his expression cold. “I don’t blame Natasha, she is what she was trained to be – and she loves you, she’d do anything to protect you. I do blame you for being a fathead, though. You’re definitely old enough to know better by now.”

“Yeah, I’d say so.” The new voice was amused but still cold, matching the expression on the face of the man who dropped down out of apparent nowhere. “Hey Nat, long time no see.” The gun in his hand was aimed squarely at her head. “I’m hurt, you’re only here for Steve. And after all we’d been to each other, too.”

She glared at him. “Barton, this is business.”

He waved his free hand. “There’s no legitimate business that requires holdin’ a knife to the throat of Stark Industries’ Director of Public Relations – if it was the CEO, maybe, but not the PR guy.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “I am so telling him you said that.”

“He’d agree with me.” Clint nodded to Bucky. “Barnes. So you two are here to kidnap Steve for Fury, huh?”

“I’m surprised it took them this long to figure it out,” Steve told him. “My guess is they’re afraid we have something that can de-power their supersoldier.”

“Obviously you do,” Natasha observed. She scowled at her former partner. “Bring it to SHIELD headquarters. Today. Captain Rogers will be released as soon as he has been examined and debriefed.” 

Steve folded his arms across his chest. “ ‘Captain Rogers’ died years ago, Agent Romanov.”

“Yeah, well we need to find out how you killed him,” Barnes shot back before she could say anything. “Stop being a stubborn bastard and cooperate.”

Steve shrugged. “You should have just asked, I’d have told you. I went back up to the Arctic…”

“You went to Alaska, Steve.”

“Close enough. I went back up to the ice and jumped in.” He looked his former friend in the eye. “I was tired, Bucky. I was done. So I ended it.”

“I know that’s not all,” Barnes snarled. “You have any idea how many times I’ve been frozen? Because of you? And I’ve still got it.”

And Steve smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile, and it actually made the larger man start to look worried. “You know, I remember that incident – I remember you initiating it, you actually getting pretty rough because you ‘couldn’t hurt me anyway,’ and Dum Dum kicking your ass for it afterwards while Farnsworth had a really long, embarrassing talk with me about why I wasn’t supposed to let someone hurt me on purpose like that, even if it was you.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“It is.” Clint was nodding…and then he fired, and Natasha slumped over with a dart sticking out of her neck. He walked up behind Steve and put an arm around him, gun now trained on Barnes. “I know because we made him tell us, Barnes. We got him drunk and the whole story came out.” He squeezed Steve’s shoulders. “A lot of things came out, actually. And you know what? Even if we could do it again – which we can’t, because _we_ didn’t do it – none of us would ever take what you’ve got now away from you. You and Natasha are welcome to the whole superhero gig. Me and Steve and Tony and Bruce? We’ve retired and moved on. We’ve found other ways to save the world.”

Barnes shook his head. “I don’t believe you – and, more to the point, SHIELD has never believed that, ever. We know you’re plotting to undermine the organization…”

“I was? Really?” Tony Stark strolled into the corridor. “Was that one of those things I signed without reading it? Because I sure don’t remember setting up a business plan to take down a covert organization operating on American soil.”

“You didn’t, you just drunk-called Rhodey and told him SHIELD sucked – and asked him to pass on to someone that they were conducting covert operations on American soil.” Steve rolled his eyes. “I believe the military’s response was ‘yes, we know’.”

“Oh yeah, right.” Stark cocked his head and assessed Barnes. “Hmm, we’re on bad-boy duty today, no stars and stripes. It really took you guys five years to figure out who Steven Carter used to be? Really?”

A voice sounded from everywhere and nowhere. “Four years, five months, and six days, sir.”

“Thank you, Jarvis, we should always strive for accuracy.” Tony saw the look of sudden alarm on the supersoldier-assassin’s face and smiled smugly. “Yes, Jarvis is here. So yes, you were made within a few minutes of entering the building, and my head of security here,” he waved a careless hand at Clint, “has been tracking dear little Natasha’s movements ever since she snuck in last night.”

“She was really helpful,” Clint told Barnes. “You can never plug every security hole, but thanks to her I’ve got a nice map of the progression someone who isn’t me would take through all of them. It’s always good to get another perspective, you know?”

Barnes ignored him. “Stark, you need to cooperate – just let me take him back to headquarters, they’ll let him go as soon as he’s been examined and debriefed. Fighting SHIELD is not something you should do, especially not for something as pitiful as this.”

Tony cocked an eyebrow at Steve. “Is that him trying to insult you? Because that was pretty weak.”

Steve smirked. “Well, yeah. But he’s not dumb, he just doesn’t have much of an imagination.” Barnes actually growled, and he rolled his eyes. “Oh please, I’m not the first person who’s ever said that and I know I won’t be the last. _You’ve_ even said it – that of the two of us, I was the one with the imagination.”

A scowl. “It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Yeah, well, I took it as one so that’s really all that matters.” The smaller man folded his arms across his chest. “Bucky, I…just go, okay? Turn around and walk away, go back to Fury and tell him I said that you are welcome to stay a supersoldier for fucking ever as far as I’m concerned – even if I knew how the _extradimensional being_ who helped me had done it, I wouldn’t dream of taking it away from you since you wanted it so damned badly.” His blue eyes narrowed. “One thing, though: Pull your head out of your ass and look up the actual records from the Army instead of just listening to people telling you what you want to hear. There were people combing that area for _months_ looking for your body, actual mountaineering teams who knew the area. And one of those teams was Russian, and they reported back that they never found anything.” He snorted. “Gee, I wonder why they’d have said a thing like that?”

“You’re lying.”

Steve shrugged. “Look it up and find out if I am – walk into any public library and use their computer, I’m sure the ones at SHIELD have all been fixed to keep you from seeing anything that might shake your fragile grip on reality.”

Barnes went beet red. “Why you little…”

“He’s a bigger man than you are – and he probably always was,” Clint cut him off. “Go on, pick up your sidekick and crawl home so Fury can yell at you.”

“Oh, and you might want to tell him to check his messages,” Tony added. “Because if he’d done that this morning? You and Batgirl wouldn’t be here to have this conversation in the first place.”

That was when a tall, aristocratic-looking man came hurrying into the corridor, flanked by two men in dark suits who looked a lot like Secret Service agents and two more men who couldn’t be anything but bodyguards. He took in the frozen tableau with a scowl. “Dear Got, I didn’t think the bastard vould really try it,” he said in heavily accented English. “Director Carter, are you quite all right?”

Steve smiled at him. “I’m fine, Minister Schmidt, thank you.” He raised a hand to his throat when he saw the other man looking. “Really, it’s just a scratch – I’ve done worse to myself shaving.”

“This vas not shaving,” Germany’s Minister of Science and Technology stated darkly. He raised an eyebrow at the now worried-looking supersoldier. “That vas the best you people could think of, kidnapping at knife-point from the mittle of an international conference? Vat are you, stupid?”

Barnes stiffened, pushing aside his startlement at the man’s name and appearance – it couldn’t be the man who had become the Red Skull and founded HYDRA, he knew it couldn’t be. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“Actually, it has to do with everybody,” Tony said quietly. “Because someone unbalanced our reality, they messed around with things so they could end us everywhere. If you don’t believe me, contact Reed Richards and ask him, he knows. He was playing around with his portal-generating thingy and he saw it, called me in an absolute panic. Thankfully it had already been fixed, though. Someone from another version of our reality showed up exactly four years, five months, and six days ago and did what was necessary so our reality – and, from what Reed saw, theirs too, and everyone else’s – would continue.”

“The guy who showed up said the problem was resonating through the multiverse,” Clint put in. “Turns out that meant taking Steve out of the equation in our universe would destroy or disable him in the rest of them too, which would have opened the door for some really bad, world-ending things to happen. He also said for us to leave you and Fury alone, because you’d bring your own punishment down on yourselves without any help from us. And since he was right about everything else,” he squeezed Steve’s shoulders again, “we decided to trust him on that score too. We won’t lift a finger against you guys unless you force us to.”

“Vitch it looks like you are trying to do,” the German minister observed. “Not a vise decision on the part of your director, and something that vill look very bad on your organization.” He snorted. “Not that you haf such a sterling reputation anyvay.”

Bucky’s jaw set. “We do what’s necessary.”

“This vas necessary?” Schmidt questioned, waving his hand towards Steve. “It vas not – it vas stupid. You act like amateurs, like children playing at being spies from the television; the real vorld does not vork that vay. So run along home, little boy, and tell your director I say to check his messages before he does anything else that vill make him look like an out-of-touch idiot.” 

“As a courtesy, since we used to know each other, I’ll give you a heads-up,” Steve added. “The World Security Council has been disbanded, the UN is over SHIELD now – and they are not happy about quite a few things. In fact, they were the ones who tipped us off that you were coming here, they want Stark Industries to keep doing what it’s doing.”

“Working toward world peace,” Tony agreed. “Encouraging the advancement of ethical science; supporting education and international collaboration; leading the way to a better, brighter future for everyone, not just for the rich, the powerful, or the lucky.” He, too, gestured toward Steve. “He wrote that, it’s in our mission statement. SHIELD has a place in this world, it’s still needed, but it had gone way past doing what was needed and that’s about to stop.”

“You can’t stop us…”

“We have no desire to – didn’t I just say you were needed?” Tony shot back. “We just want you to stop playing fucking games all over the planet, we want you back to doing your damned job. This,” he waved his hand, “is not it. So get the fuck out of my building and don’t come back, because I can tell you right now you’re never going to be welcome.” 

For some reason that seemed to throw the supersoldier, and he shot a questioning look at Steve. “But, we…”

“If you’re about to say we’re friends, we aren’t – we were, but we aren’t anymore,” Steve told him quietly. “I’m sorry if that was something you were hanging on to, but this,” he, too, waved his hand, “would have definitely been a deal-breaker on that even if I had been willing to let the rest of it go. We’re even, Bucky,” he said. “In terms you can understand…there’s no more red in my ledger, I paid you back in spades. So go away and have a nice life.” The very slightest of smiles. “You even got the girl, you should be happy now.”

Bucky cocked an eyebrow, something almost hopeful in his expression. “Jealous?”

Steve shrugged. “No. I’m happy with the person I’m with. And she was in love with you, even then – I don’t think she ever really loved anyone else, actually.”

“She didn’t.” Clint pulled Steve back and motioned for everyone else to move back as well. He still hadn’t put down his gun. “Take her home, Barnes. And tell her from me that if she ever touches Steve again, I will kill her without a second thought.”

Bucky took that in, eyes widening when he finally noticed – and recognized the significance of – the proprietary way Clint was holding on to Steve. He swallowed, making a few more realizations about long-past events that made the bottom drop out of his stomach and left him feeling all of three inches high. Especially when it came to one particular incident, late one night in the woods in Poland, that Dugan had rightfully kicked his ass over. 

He walked forward, slowly, picked up Natasha in his arms, and then straightened. He nodded to Clint. “You won’t have any more problems from ‘Tasha and I,” he said. “Orders or no orders. And Steve…” He swallowed again. “I’ll go to the library.”

Steve just nodded. “I’ll have you escorted out,” Stark said, and a shadow blocked off the light from the windows – one of which swung open. The Hulk was there, and he was frowning at Bucky. “Idiot,” he rumbled. “Make this fast, I have a meeting in fifteen.” Then he waved. “Minister Schmidt.”

“Dr. Banner,” Schmidt responded. “I vill hold the meeting for you if you are late.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it. But this shouldn’t take very long, not like he’s any kind of match for me.”

Schmidt laughed. “Very true, Doctor, very true.”

The Hulk held out his hands. “Give her to me, then come out this way – we’re not taking this back through the conference hall, you aren’t on the schedule of events.” He snorted when the supersoldier hesitated. “I won’t hurt her, Barnes; she’s scared of me because I _scared_ her. Which is not at all unreasonable, considering the circumstances. Now come on, we all have other places we need to be.”

Bucky couldn’t argue with that. And he knew he couldn’t argue with the Hulk and win – especially not an integrated Banner/Hulk, something Fury was _not_ going to be happy about – so he handed over Natasha and then easily pulled himself up onto the window ledge. Part of him wanted to look back, but he knew he wasn’t going to see what he was looking for, hoping for, if he did. All he was going to see was what he’d lost and now couldn’t ever get back.

Pity he hadn’t known he wanted it back – or that he’d lost it in the first place – until now. He squared his shoulders as he walked away, taking his already-stirring partner back to the car he had waiting. He was Captain America, he’d gotten the girl and the fame and the power, he had everything he’d ever wanted, he was on top of the world.

And if he ever slipped off…well, there was always Alaska.  


End file.
